Student Profile

all postdocs, junior group leaders and junior professors

Target Group

all postdocs, junior group leaders and junior professors

Objectives

The daily routine of a head of the group ranges between the poles of research and leading and supervising a staff which entails specific challenges. The success of good leaders is indicated by their staff’s willingness to perform well. Technical or functional know-how alone is not sufficient in this regard; methodical and personal skills are called for. This workshop is going to meet these challenges with an integrated offer of training and coaching sessions.

As successful leadership starts with oneself, thus managing oneself is going to be one of three key objectives. The participants have the chance to reflect on their individual resources and strong points: Which strong point do I have? How can I use these strong points in leadership situations? How can I develop my leadership skills further? How can we learn from different understandings of one´s role?

Therefore, the second key objective concerns leadership skills. In order to meet the challenges of the daily routine it is crucial to communicate what you expect from your staff and vice versa what they can expect of you. The second part of the workshop focusses on the questions how to motivate your staff, how to lead with goals, how to delegate tasks successfully, how to give feedback in a constructive way and how to lead meetings effectively. Furthermore, these instruments will consider diversity aspects. These instruments can also easily be applied on the supervision of students.

The third key objective shows how these instruments can be applied to to manage diversity aspects in teams such as reconciling family and work life, different cultures and discontinuities because of labor turnover.

Methods

The methods, such as role plays, action games or reflective exercises enable to participate actively as much as possible. The workshop offers also the possibility to work on individual issues within the method of solution-oriented peer coaching. The participants work on their own issues and, at the same time, they can make use of the entire group’s wealth of experience when reflecting on and finding solutions for their individual topics. The different perspectives of the group members also help in expanding the range of ideas and in taking different roles and points of view. Possible topics could be for example: dealing with a difficult staff member, coping with labor turnover or coping with diversity aspects.

Important Notes

The participants will get an invitation to clarify their expectation four weeks in advance of the workshop.